2020 was an audition for what may come
Human health, social justice and climate action are not separate issues
Hi! I took a bit of a break from sending this newsletter while I changed jobs. After two-plus years of doing digital communications at the Pembina Institute, I’ve moved into a new role at TVO where I’ll be focusing on copywriting and – surprise, surprise – email newsletters. 📬
I’ll still be writing this newsletter in my spare time, but haven’t settled into a new posting schedule yet. So stay tuned!
Oh, and just a reminder that none of the opinions I share here reflect the views of my employers (past or present.)
Yes, 2020 sucked
It sucked lots. It may have even sucked the most. And yet, the trajectory of our global temperatures suggests that there may be far worse years in our future.
As a dad, and someone who generally likes inhabiting this planet, I’m not pleased by these thoughts. But humans have already established a framework for chaos that will allow future variants of 2020 to come. And keep coming.
Rising global temperatures exacerbate all systems, as all systems are linked to the health of our climate. A warming Earth means increasing climate migration, which sets the stage for more divisive politicians who exploit base human behaviours like racism and xenophobia.
A warming Earth means increasing food insecurity, which disproportionately impacts populations with little power and only deepens economic inequality, while also perpetuating white privilege.
A warming Earth requires climate action with increasing urgency and scale, so the longer we put off massive changes, the greater and more costly those changes will need to be.
Source: Associated Press
2020 is neck-and-neck with 2016 as our hottest year to date. The increase in global temperature and likelihood for extreme weather events didn’t happen just because of what we did in the past 12 months, but rather what we didn’t do in the decades before.
As David Wallace-Wells writes in his bone-chilling book, The Uninhabitable Earth, “more than half of the carbon exhaled into the atmosphere by the burning of fossil fuels has been emitted in just the past three decades.”
We can attribute a lot of the climate-related stress we’re enduring now, and will soon endure in the future, to very recent human activity. According to the Environmental Protection Agency in the U.S., “Since 1970, CO2 emissions have increased by about 90%, with emissions from fossil fuel combustion and industrial processes contributing about 78% of the total greenhouse gas emissions increase from 1970 to 2011.”
Or, to put it another way:
“Earth has warmed 1.6 degrees (0.9 degrees Celsius) since 1942, when [President!] Joe Biden was born, and 1.2 degrees (0.6 degrees Celsius) since 1994, when pop star Justin Bieber was born, according to NOAA data.”
Why are you trying to bum me out?
I know, I know. This is all a bummer, and it’s not actually that productive to only think of the scale of the climate threat without considering our prospects for success. We’ve got plenty to feel good about, too:
We are making the shift towards a low-carbon economy, but the transition is just too slow.
For all its carnage, COVID-19 at least gives us very frequent reminders about the danger it poses to us on an immediate timescale – which should be enough to direct our behaviour and policies. If the novel coronavirus spread in the same manner as climate change (i.e., like a redoubling tidal wave without end), the scale of the pandemic would be immeasurably worse.
While the vaccine will eventually provide the relief we need and allow us to return to some version of our normal lives, what nags at me is that very temptation to return to normal. Normal is what got us here. Normal is unsustainable.
“A vaccine will help to end the pandemic. But it will not address the vulnerabilities that lie at its root. There is no vaccine for poverty. There is no vaccine for hunger. There is no vaccine for inequality. There is no vaccine for climate change. Once the pandemic ends, we will be left with even greater challenges than before it started.”
- Recent remarks from WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus
What the pandemic has taught us
None of the following will feel like “good news” for anyone who has acutely suffered or lost someone during this pandemic. I’m hoping that, whenever we defeat COVID-19 and reclaim our world, we’ll at least have learned enough about our systemic weaknesses to better manage whatever comes next.
Our health care system is surprisingly resilient, but not invincible. I can’t imagine the fatigue being felt by every frontline worker, especially those in health care. A survey published this month shows “nearly 78 per cent of nurses … reported feeling a sense of burnout in the previous month.” We’ve leaned so hard on them and they’ve shown they can handle more than anyone should have to deal with day after day. They can’t do this forever, though.
Canadians, for the most part, can be motivated to rally together. In addition to frontline workers who keep showing heroic efforts to support us, I’m relieved to see how people in this country have generally stuck together. There are many – too many – exceptions to this, from restaurateurs spouting misinformation to politicians who act like rules don’t apply to them, to overstressed parents who show lapses in judgement. Our social fabric is fraying a bit, but it’s not tearing apart just yet.
Governments can see beyond election cycles. I’m pretty satisfied with how Canada has responded to the pandemic so far. I obviously support the concept of a “green recovery” and created this newsletter as a way to explore it. Over the past year, I’ve been relieved to see our federal government recognizes that the massive investments needed to recover from the pandemic should also be used to support our transition to a low-carbon economy – something we must do anyways.
We don't need the emissions or stress of daily commuting. Our lives have been disrupted with stay-at-home policies, but the necessity of shared office spaces has been in question since the invention of the Internet. Daily commuting is stressful and wastes time, and it also contributes to a massive source of our greenhouse gas emissions (~25% of Canada’s 2018 emissions came from transportation). Most of us who have been working remotely don’t want to go back to the way it was before, although there are significant inequality issues we would need to address in a more permanent shift to remote work.
A green recovery is not just a series of investments for hitting two birds with the same publicly funded stone. It’s an attempt to make use of the mountains of evidence we have indicating that pre-pandemic Canada wasn’t working the way it should.
That’s smart thinking, and it’s a cause for hope.
Find me on Twitter @seanminogue or check out my website here.